Having a website is an important element of your surface pattern design business but I know it can be confusing to know which platform you should use. We are going to look at a few different options that you might want to consider for setting up your website.

If you’re ready to start putting your portfolio online then the best way is to set up a website. I know how overwhelming it can be in terms of knowing where to get started with this process if you’re brand new to this. So I wanted to go through and just give you some of the options that you have and you can think about which one might suit you the best.

WordPress

I’m going to start with WordPress. the reason that people like WordPress is that it gives you a lot of flexibility in the way that it can be used and gives you a lot more control over what you’re able to do. For example, you can add all sort of plugins and you are able to do some powerful things. But if you’re brand new to creating a website WordPress can feel quite overwhelming. You can get some beautiful things that you can use with WordPress, which will really help if, and so I would definitely recommend doing that if you are going to be using WordPress to make it easier. You will also need to organise to host your site through a hosting service.

Squarespace

Squarespace is an all-in-one service where you will create your website and it will also host it for you. You can select a theme that suits and you can add your elements to suit. It’s generally much easier to use than WordPress however depending on the theme you will be limited in what you can do. So that means it may lack some flexibility in you being able to move things around in the way you want them or you might be even limited to the colors that you can use. Squarespace is a very popular platform and lots of designers use it.

Showit

Another great option for your website builder is Showit. Showit allows you to use their website builder to build beautiful web pages and it links with WordPress which hosts your blog (if you have one). You will also need to get a separate hosting service just like with WordPress. So it’s a little bit of a combination of the last two platforms that I’ve described. I absolutely love Showit and it’s what I currently use. The reason that I love it so much is because it works just like Illustrator in the way that you are able to place elements any way you want on top of each other, rotating images around whatever you like to do on those pages.

To dive in deeper into the pros and cons of the platforms I mentioned, make sure you listen to the podcast episode.

You can download my Pattern Design Secrets eBook here